Approximate Distance Oracles for Planar Graphs with Improved Query Time-Space Tradeoff

We consider approximate distance oracles for edge-weighted n-vertex undirected planar graphs. Given fixed epsilon > 0, we present a (1+epsilon)-approximate distance oracle with O(n(loglog n)^2) space and O((loglog n)^3) query time. This improves the previous best product of query time and space of the oracles of Thorup (FOCS 2001, J. ACM 2004) and Klein (SODA 2002) from O(n log n) to O(n(loglog n)^5).